“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” – Ronald Reagan.
Into his simple statement, Ronald
Reagan distilled the greatest threat and the greatest strength of America: the
ideas of it. We could forget them. We could become so enamored of the false
idols of socialism that we finally fail completely to pass along the meaning
and significance of America. The Prudent
observer already recognizes that a large fraction of U. S. citizens are far
down that path.
What makes this possible? Obviously, education is worth examining; so is immigration; so, too, is ghetto-ization. Let’s look at the last. Ghettos form somewhat naturally, primarily for ethnic reasons, which is to say, cultural reasons. They form economically, as well, but where the only shared “norm” is poverty… or substantial wealth.
Religious ghettos are well recorded and well-storied in history. Most were either harmless or threatening to a power-structure. Some were left in peace, most eventually destroyed for their “other-ness,” and the implied threat that represented.
Most ghettos engender resentment, or cohere because of it. Shared resentment is a political tinderbox, to which outside intrusion, however legitimate, can provide the explosive spark. In and of itself, ghetto-ization is deconstructive of the greater society, corrosive and segregationist. There is no good reason to encourage the growth or even the existence of ghettos – of any sort, at least not in a democratic, free-enterprise republic.
In its perpetual confusion, religious sectarianism both creates and attempts to integrate, ghettos. Part of Judeo-Christian teaching is to “…come apart and be a separate and chosen people.” It is not dissimilar to many other faiths. The direction seeks purity of body, mind and soul. When the rest of the “world” is deemed impure and immoral, “sickly” in a sense, quarantine appears wise, and temporarily it is. Enlightened sects both separate themselves and purposely integrate themselves, hoping to attract some – if not all – of the impure and immoral to adopt their ways of belief and of life.
Mere enlightenment can easily evolve into messianism, causing religious groups to send missionaries out to dissimilar, and therefore, “heathen” lands who are living in sin for no other reason than ignorance of the one, true path.
But ghettos, religious, ethnic, economic, tend to inhibit understanding – understanding which is essential to cultural/social survival based on shared mores and standards, habits and language. Those “inside” tend to mostly talk to one another, share distrusts of outsiders with one another, hear only opinions from one another and, eventually, for some, reinforce one another’s hatreds for outsiders.
Hatred is unhealthy, especially so for relatively “open” societies, where there is freedom of movement, speech and expression… and where there are politicians. Hatred spawns a rotten sort of political power… a sort that is happy to ply ghetto hatreds with pandering postulates, even to the point of social revolution. That is, every form of “establishment” power is besmirched and derogated until the cravings of those seeking votes are but a shade away from the hatreds of the marginalized.
It would seem unwise to spur the creations of more ghettos, and unwise to feed the ones that exist such that they need not integrate and come to better understandings.
In effect, the United States has permitted, encouraged and protected the formation of new ghettos, both through civil tolerance of the rights of homeless people to remain drugged while living animally on appropriated public lands, and by importing enclaves of aliens whose cultures and belief structures are not only unlike our own, but antithetical to our own. The great “melting pot” of quickly assimilating immigrants is a quaint notion. Immigrants today come, in part, to show Americans how inferior our mores are to their “superior” ones, from which they have fled to our shores. This is unhealthy.
At the same time our social welfare industry strengthens and feeds the original, “black” ghettos, feeding their politically powerful support to those in government who feed the welfare industry. More recent ghettos based on Central and South American attitudes and language(s) actually compete for the support from the welfare industry that was largely delivered to blacks 50 years ago. The United States literally fights to grow those ghettos in contravention of our own laws. This is doubly unhealthy since it cements a disregard for law amongst our fastest growing minorities, many of whom reside here illegally. Very unhealthy.
Very few within the ghettos described share understandings of our Constitution or of our common law and standards. For these growing sub-cultures, there is no need to forget our heritage: they come or are born without it and there is no requirement to adopt it in order to enjoy our land and protections, legally and honestly or not.
For the rest of us, upon whom the survival of the ideas of America rests, many of our youth are ignorant of, have forgotten or have been instructed away from those ideas. One generation is all it will take to lose everything.
